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An Early Ad for the Most Successful Personal-Data-Tracking Device of All Time
In 1913, a prominent watch company promised its time pieces would help buyers 'to form desirable habits of promptness and precision.'The rise of data-driven personal tracking is one of the biggest...
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Good for Science, Bad for Your Nightmares: Moths That Drive Robots
The next generation of robots may work like moths to a flame pheromone. Institute of Physics/YouTube A group of silkworm moths, coached by researchers at the University of Tokyo, just took a driving...
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If You Want Your Wikipedia Page to Get a TON of Traffic, Die While Performing...
A look at what causes Wikipedia's biggest traffic spikesAP In the course of an average week, the most popular articles on Wikipedia can get somewhere in the range of about 700,000 to 1.5 million...
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Here's What a Solar Flare *Sounds* Like When It Reaches Earth
Get ready: It's loud. A much, much bigger solar flare than the one Thomas Ashcraft captured (NASA) Amateur radio astronomer Thomas Ashcraft doesn't like to just look at space: He also listens to it....
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And Now Let Us Praise, and Consider the Absurd Luck of, Famous Men
A lesson about the success of Great Men from Intel co-founder Bob Noyce's life story. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter and Square co-founder Jack Dorsey tweeted this:Success is never accidental.-- Jack...
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Richard III's Bones: Is This the Beginning of an Exhumation Craze?
The world is fascinated by the king's remains, found under a parking lot in Leicester. But some academics have mixed feelings about the discovery. A facial reconstruction of Richard III, based on a CT...
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The Life and Death of Great Virtual Cities
Friends. The great Clive Thompson (Wired, The Times Magazine, New York) is doing some writing on virtual communities and how and why they hold together. He is actually writing a book, and I think he...
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The Land of the Free: How Virtual Fences Will Transform Rural America
A relatively straightforward technological innovation -- GPS-equipped free-range cows that can be nudged back within virtual bounds by ear-mounted stimulus-delivery devices -- could profoundly reshape...
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Um, What's This Weird Hunk of Metal We Just Found on Mars?
... Really, what is it? NASA/JPL-Caltech/Malin Space Science Systems and Pokomeda Mars is, on the one hand, a source of unending fascination. It is, after all, Mars. And we're exploring it with, you...
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Etsy CTO: Prioritizing Diversity in Our Hiring Fielded Better Women ... and Men
In a less than two-year period, Etsy quintupled the number of women on its engineering staff, and made other gains in the process. Etsy has a pretty female vibe. About 80 percent of its customers are...
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Satellite Images of Penguin Guano From Space Lead to Discovery of 9,000...
In 2009, scientists noticed some odd stains cropping up in satellite images of Antarctica's Princess Ragnhild Coast. Now, explorers have traveled there -- the first humans to visit the 9,000-odd...
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YouTube Is Yoda, You Are Luke: How the Video Site Became Our Storehouse of...
I want to tell you a little story about how YouTube has become a unique repository for very useful information. What makes it special is that YouTube taps people who want to show you what they know,...
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Thousands of Minimoons: Our Moon Is Not Alone
There's the one big one we all know and love, but there are also minimoons that temporarily orbit our planet. Maybe, just maybe, we can snag one and bring it back to Earth. The simulated path of a...
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Watch This Drone Follow Around Chris Anderson Like a 'Pet Robot Bird'
Drones may not be delivering tacos through your window or following around your kids just yet. But this is one of the building blocks of that future, for good or for ill. On a recent day, not so far...
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A Kindred Spirit on 'Interesting' Software
I don't know anything about Jack Baty, listed as "Director of Unspecified Services" at his eponymous site. Mascot photo from his site at right; I have no idea whether that's actually him. But I think...
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Walter Cronkite Demonstrates the Home of the Future in 1967
Take heart. You could be controlling your television from a panel half the size of a pool table. Sometimes, I take the remote control and the hardware and software it controls for granted. Increasingly...
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Leonardo's Notebook Digitized in All Its Befuddling Glory
The British Library has been digitizing some of its prize pieces and they announced a new round of six artifacts had been completed including Beowulf, a gold-ink penned Gospel, and one of Leonardo Da...
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The Beautiful Thing That Happens When You Project Video Onto Falling Snow
Colorful, digital confetti Brian Maffitt/Flickr As snow fell across the northeast over the weekend, Brian Maffitt of Chestnut Ridge, New York, had a brilliant idea: Project a movie, with the falling...
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Next Stop for Controversial Airport Scanners: Office Buildings?
Say "cheese," federal employees! Imagine this, in your office. (Reuters) Last month, the Transportation Security Administration ended its contract with the airport scanner maker Rapiscan, pledging to...
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The Real Tomorrowland: Apple Stores Get Almost as Many Visitors as Disney's...
Today, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke at Goldman's technology conference with analyst Bill Shope. Among other factoids, Cook mentioned that 120 million people visited Apple's retail stores last year. I...
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